Sébastien Plassard’s subtly absurd, boldly coloured dreamscapes

Sébastien Plassard is an illustrator whose distinctive and colourful work is used effectively across media, featured in editorials, book covers, film festival posters and other events.

His style typically forgoes the use of outline, relying on the illustrator’s succinct use of contrastive and complementary colours. The flattened cells, richly pervaded with hues of orange and blue, are then given depth by a commanding use of shadow. “I look for a balance between colours and shapes and a contradiction, a tension in the narration,” he explains. These deeply muted tones of black build dimensions in the shapes of the objects. “Technically, I make a rough and I look for a composition on paper and I rework the colours and textures on computer,” he says.

Dynamic and still, Sébastien captures a subtle absurdity in his scenes, from businessmen scrimmaging and scuffling up a spiral staircas to a boxer literally knocking his opponent’s block off, and the iconic house-falling scene from Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill Jr.

In its colourful minimalism, Sébastien’s imagery borders on dreamscape, invoking a retrofuturistic appeal with appearances throughout his work of blimps, Victorian era aircrafts, 1920s race cars and a man riding what can only be described as a mechanical horse-bike. Sébastien says: “When I draw I am in quest of poetry. I look for a singular atmosphere with fantasy, with absurdity…I want the picture to talk by itself like a full language.”